This is a cross-post from my recent article in Forbes:

I often hear executives struggling to understand the power and promise of mobile devices as it relates to their business. “I would never want to receive an ad on my phone for nearby pizza,” they say. Or, “The iPhone is a small percentage of the phone market. What does it have to do with my business?” This is a bit like looking at the emergence of the railroads in the 1800s and saying, “I have no interest in going to Chicago. What’s the big deal?”

Here are a few ways in which mobility matters:

With mobility, coordination replaces planning. As communications protocols accelerate to real-time (think Twitter) we are seeing more work processes move to approaches that favor just-in-time coordination over advanced planning. It is more efficient and more flexible. In software development, this is called the Agile approach where developers code in short, iterative loops, constantly processing the feedback to refine the end product. In product development, this is Fast Cycle Time. In organizational design, this is real-time collaboration and the flattened organization. In the Army, mobile communications are reconfiguring the traditional command-and-control hierarchy, pushing decision-making to the soldier in the field who has the most information about the situation at hand. The implications go beyond military maneuvers. With a workforce able to remain in real-time contact anywhere, possibilities emerge for new management techniques and an increased role for employees.

As we find ourselves tied to mobile devices, coordination will increasingly become the organizing principle that defines how we get work done; we will become a network of spontaneous gathering, loosely coordinated agents in constant contact.

Mobility is not about phones and it is not about computers. Most of us don’t consider how much sensing intelligence is packed into a smart phone. The iPhone is a rich portable computer with on-board sensors capable of gathering huge volumes of data. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer), directionally aware (compass) visually aware (camera that can gather visual input of the immediate environment), sonically aware (microphone and speakers), always-connected (wireless or 3Gs) handheld computer. In short, the iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor.

This is an enormous leap forward when our devices are not only connected but actively accepting input from the world around them. We can track our own behavior, monitor our own health and get things done together (e.g., crowdsource maps of our neighborhood). At the far end of the spectrum, the iPhone is being used as a medical diagnostic tool. Doctors without borders, indeed.

Meet your new laptop. Apple has not only opened a programming interface that allows developers to create applications that reside on the iPhone, the company has recently opened up the hardware interface. This means that, soon, attaching a keyboard and screen (among other things) to your iPhone literally will be a snap.

The staggering increase in processing and storage capacity per-square-inch, allied with the development of flexible OLED screens and palm-sized projectors, will allow our mobile devices to do more than our PCs. The mobile device is headed to dethrone the laptop as the de facto standard gear for knowledge work.

The new marketplace here, there and everywhere. Much of the future of commerce will lie in micropayments made at the exact moment of impulse or need–from music to subway tickets and so on. Smart phones now have bar code and QR code readers that allow the phone to act as a scanner (to find the exact product), research assistant (find the best price online, check product ratings) and shopping agent (buy the product on the spot). If you are a retailer, you are now facing a customer with more choices, information and bargaining power than ever before. You will need to rethink your value beyond simply carrying inventory.

In the developing world, where technology constraints often inspire innovation, people are forming alternative currencies, mainly in the form of sharable minutes on their mobile devices. This means, for example, that I can transfer 10 minutes of talk time to your phone in exchange for something of equivalent value–say, a spare part or carton of milk. The most basic peer-to-peer exchange of funds has already gone mobile in certain parts of the developing world.

Getting things done. Mobility is about how your customers are increasingly getting things done–from shopping to reading to wayfinding. Understanding how mobility will change your customer is key to understanding how you will stay relevant.

If you are a product manager, or in R&D, what can the iPhone teach you about product design? What can mobility developments in Africa teach you about constraint-based innovation? If you are in marketing or customer service, what can your younger employees teach you about your next customer? Consider doing a bit of reverse mentoring and prepare to be stunned.

If you are a senior executive, ask yourself how you plan to handle the management challenges as your workforce gets even more disconnected from workplace.

Staying informed about the incredible work occurring at the margins is one of the keys to getting to the future first. Don’t write it off. Embrace the big idea. If you want to talk about it, call me on my mobile. It knows where to find me.

Cross-posted from Forbes: I just finished watching the video for Red Laser, a real-time bar code scanner that works on the iPhone (video below the fold).     Just hold the camera-eye over the UPC code and get ready for results to show up from Google Product Search or Amazon.   Then begin reading customer reviews, comparing prices etc. The clue to forecasting the future is to watch the trendline – not the snapshot.  Redlaser may be a bit clunky right now, not everyone has an iPhone etc.  That is the snapshot.   Here is the trendline:   We are becoming accustomed to using our phones in-the-moment to answer all manner of questions (who was the actor in that film? and so on).  This small behavioral change has huge implications as more and more of our physical world finds its data-doppleganger online:

• How long before we can scan any food product and know more about its ingredients than the misleading label tells us?
• How long before every in-store customer seamlessly moves online to the vast Internet marketplace to find the rock-bottom price and bargain with the store manager?
• How long before every object’s identity in the physical world can be referenced to a super-set of attributes such as reviews, ingredients, price comparison, carbon rating etc.

This referencing need not be through a set of UPC codes that you consciously scan.   Just as your computer can access the Gracenote database to identify the artist, tracks and times of a random music CD that you put into your drive,  we are heading into a time when any experience will likely be passively cataloged (movies you are watching, music you are listening to and so on) for later reference. This has quite a few implications: (1) I think these technologies will accelerate  a race to the bottom on pricing as ever more shoppers with a mobile do product and price-comparison at the in-store point of sale. (2) Thus service and experience based products will become even more critical to a retailer’s success. (3) Product (or service) quality will increasingly trump crafty advertising as the only sustainable advantage once customers have instant access to more reviews and information from peers. 4) Environmental and other cause issues will be of increased importance as consumers will find it easier to live out their values in their product purchases. (5) Personal data – your location, wayfinding through the mall, product searches and even your exposure to ambient types of advertising (did you watch that commercial?) will be captured via your mobile device.  This is already happening in simple form via IMMI (be afraid) for those willing to get a free mobile device in exchange for being tracked 24/7. Overall I believe that these technologies will empower people by giving them more access to valuable, peer-created information.  However, these last predictions (or rather observations on the growth of what is already taking place) should cause a healthy amount of anxiety about personal privacy.  I have committed a fair amount of time writing about these issues on O’Reilly Radar.  Like all powerful technology the benefits need to be framed within a structure that protects our ability to act as free agents in the world.

Platforms beat applications.  OK -    So what is a platform?  The nomenclature of platforms and applications arise from technology but I will use a low tech retail metaphor.   An application in this analogy is The Foot Locker (let’s just say) while the platform is the Mall.   The mall is a platform in that it provides many of the conditions necessary for The Foot Locker to exist;  physical infrastructure, foot traffic (no pun originally intended) etc.   This allows The Foot Locker to focus its attention on what it does best – market and sell shoes.  They don’t need to allocate finances towards owning the building and all the hazards that entails.    If Foot Locker is unsuccessful, there are other small business owners that might be eager to make use of the space in the mall.   The mall is a platform that allows myriad small/large businesses to flourish.

The best exemplar of the platform recently is the iPhone.   The iPhone allows developers to build applications that reside on the iPhone (the mall if you will).  These applications can take full advantage of the iPhone’s physical infrastructure (sensors like the accelerometer for games, microphone, GPS chipset etc.) and reach (37 million iPhones to date).  This is a compelling proposition.   There have been 35,000 applications developed – and 1 billion application downloads.   iPhone is now opening up its hardware to allow people to develop physical devices… (I imagine my iPhone as a netbook in the near future).

Platforms can be a powerful concept for re-imagining your business and is part of what I talk about when I say, Open beats Closed.   There is more talent outside your walls than within — find a way to tap into that creative potential.  Platforms are also a way of reimagining  our government….

This is the heart of Ed Felten’s recent post, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, on how to make government more transparent.  The genius stroke is right here at the beginning,

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Beautiful… Felten is telling Government to build a platform that leverages citizen engagement.   It is an interesting notion to think about how new technological advancements (namely, the Internet) will reconfigure our very notion of democracy.    My Society and Frontseat (see my interview with founder Mike Mathieu here) already take available data for citizens to remix.  Imagine how powerful this can be if government saw itself as a platform rather than owning the whole mall.